None of us have the monopoly on grief, but when it comes, it has a way of piercing through and isolating you in your own bubble. A tailor-made experience that has been designed to effect you to your very core.
Loss, sorrow, missing someone are all incompatible and irreconcilable with the reality of the emptiness which grief brings. You are thrown into the very heart of it, and you have no choice. No choice but to live on in what can only be, what must be, some cruel parallel universe.
A world with no 6pm call to check a recipe,
no dinner table talk of the weeks happenings,
no sharing of books read,
no asking of ‘favours’,
no career advice,
no boyfriend vetting,
no mother of the bride,
no 50th wedding anniversary,
no baby time with gran.
Lost memories, both lived and unlived all suddenly, somehow, voided.
It is a battle of realities, an inundation of memories past and imagined. One reality with its own intermingling of the ghosts of past, present and yet to come. Where the other reality plods on tirelessly in tow.
In Dutch you would wish someone ‘sterkte’, a compassionate expression recognising that difficult times are ahead, and an extra dose of ‘strength’ will come in handy. It’s a term with no direct English translation, and one I have always admired, but it has got me thinking about our understanding of strength.
I will fully admit I am generally someone who likes to be in control of their emotions. I do not like to ‘slip’ in this regard, and I even pride myself that few will have seen me in tears (God forbid!), and if they have, could count these moments on one hand. It is both ironic and poignant then that, in my case, my grief experience, has included an influx of overwhelming and unrelenting waves of emotion. If I was worried before of shedding a tear in front of a close friend, I now have to check and subdue myself in a train full of people, at the cash register in a shop, on the street, behind my desk at work…the list continues.
As I adjust to this element of my new reality, I realise the ridiculous things we view as ‘strong’, things which hold up ever so well, that is until they don’t. I can be strong with full bravado in the eyes of the world, but true strength is also allowing yourself to be weak, vulnerable, lacking in control and utterly exposed to the elements. I also recognise this is much easier to say than to put into practice.
Strength inverted, strength as weakness, clashes with so many of our ideologies. Weakness is not glamorous, not ‘appropriate’, will not impress well on others, is too often misunderstood and misinterpreted. Yet it opens doors in a way a show of strength never will. No matter how much I am loathe to succumb to it, I am never more spiritual, more humble, or more connected to others than when I am vulnerable and ‘weak’.
In this Easter weekend just passed then, as we remember the pain, humiliation and sacrifice of good Friday, the bitter mixed with the sweet of Easter Sunday to follow and its celebration of joy, relief and praise. It reminds me to embrace the fragile, uncomfortable and painful rather than push it aside. Slowly but necessarily taking steps in another direction, towards a new strength, full of brokenness, full of humility, full of grace.
“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”
– Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms –
*The Weepies, ‘World spins madly on’
Rx
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